On Thursday afternoon the operations manager at a forty-five-person job shop has fourteen purchase requisitions waiting for approval. Nine are reorders: the same coolant concentrate, the same carbide inserts, the same box of gloves, from the same suppliers at the same prices as last month. Two are new tooling for a job that starts Monday. Three are odd one-offs. She approves all fourteen in four minutes; the reorders she never even reads. The machinist has been nursing a worn insert since Tuesday.
Nobody decided a box of gloves needs a manager's signature. The approval dates from when every purchase was a real decision, and it never stopped.
An approval that always says yes is not a control
An approval step exists to catch something: the wrong supplier, a price that crept up, a purchase nobody needs. When it almost never catches anything, it is not protecting the business. It is a queue, and the cost of the queue lands on the person waiting for the part.
In our experience, the usual fix is a faster queue: approvals on a phone, a reminder email. That is the same job, done quicker. The better question is whether the job should exist at all.
What UnitedHealthcare stopped asking for
Health insurance has an approval step that doctors and hospitals widely resent: prior authorization, under which providers must "get an insurer’s OK before providing care," as Healthcare Dive puts it. Healthcare Dive reported on September 2, 2026, that UnitedHealthcare, in a memo to providers, would drop prior authorization for roughly 1,700 medical codes starting in October. The insurer said that amounts to roughly 30% of its preapproval requirements across its commercial, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plans.
How it chose matters. Eric Hausman, a UnitedHealthcare spokesperson, said the insurer focused on services with proven evidence of clinical efficacy and where approval rates are consistently high. It went looking for approvals that consistently said yes, for care with proven value, and removed them.
This was not a first. In 2023, UnitedHealthcare removed prior authorization from codes it said made up nearly 20% of its request volume, and it said in spring 2026 that it would eliminate 30% of its prior authorizations by the end of 2026. The codes list is the detail behind that pledge. It also already runs a gold card program, which lets practitioners whose requests are consistently approved skip most approvals. Healthcare Dive notes that hospitals and doctors are generally wary of insurer promises like this one, and the change arrived amid growing public pressure on insurers. The structural move is still worth studying.
Before and after, for those codes
Before: the doctor's office submits a request, waits, receives a decision, and only then schedules the care. After: the office schedules the care. The request, the wait and the decision are gone, not sped up.
The same move, inside a job shop, looks like this. Before: the machinist tells the lead, the lead writes a requisition, the manager approves it, purchasing places the order. After, for anything on a written list of routine reorders under a dollar limit, from an approved supplier, at or below last price: the lead places the order. The manager reviews a weekly list of what was bought, after the fact, and looks for anything that should not be there.
The weekly look is where the control now lives. It can catch the same things the approval was meant to catch, after the fact, without making anyone wait for a part.
The hard part is writing down "routine"
The work is defining which purchases do not need an approval. That means a list of items, suppliers, a price rule and a dollar limit, written down and kept current. A vague list gets stretched, and the first oversized order brings the old approval back for everything.
Who will resist, and why they are right
The operations manager will resist, and she has a reason. The approval is how she knows what is being bought, and the weekly list is easy to skip on a busy Friday. If nobody reads it, the shop has removed the control and kept nothing in its place. Give the after-the-fact review a fixed day and a short format, and let her shrink the routine list if she finds something she does not like.
The honest no: if your approvals actually catch problems often, say a wrong price or an unneeded order every week or two, this approval is doing its job and should stay. Check the history before you cut it. And if no one can say what last month's price was, fix your supplier records first. A rule that says "at or below last price" means nothing without them.
If this is your Thursday afternoon, the ten agent roles are in the Library.